SOME THINGS NEED TO BE SUSTAINED, NOT CHANGED

Trailing arbutus, trillium, old-fashioned hollyhock do they have anything in common? I know the first two are on the endangered list, or protected list, however you want to put it. But old-fashioned, single-petaled hollyhocks with luminescent blossoms in rainbow shades on majestic stalks that reach toward the summer skies? That old, chicken yard, barnyard, hog pen flower? It needs to be protected? I'm beginning to think it does.

I went to this, that and the other local garden stores in search of some to replenish my dwindling collection only to hear, "No, No old-fashioned, single-petaled hollyhocks." I searched the seed racks. I found the up-bred, double-petaled kind. In my opinion they're about as hardy as a limber-necked chicken.

Flower breeders sometimes just can't let well enough alone. Fragrance I sacrificed for something, I don't know what. Many blossoms are sacrificed for fewer though larger.

I suppose hollyhocks are a low brow plant for modern day flower gardens. But to me, big bold spikes of rosy red hollyhocks rising up above blue and pink larkspurs blooming at the same time are something to arrest the eye. Especially when animated by visiting hummingbirds and big, bumbling bumblebees, heavily laden with saddlebags of pollen.

A lot of nostalgia colors my opinion of hollyhocks. Perhaps they were the first flowers I really noticed. Attached to one corner of our gray-weathered, plaster chinked, log smokehouse was a picket fence, also gray and weathered. In this right angle corner grew hollyhocks, masterful hollyhocks, rearing up well above my head. My sisters and I thought this the perfect place for our play house. Play house? Ah, me, are there a few who remember what they were? They were non-tax supported, non-governmentally decreed nor multi-bureau forerunners of a mishmash now of family learning centers, planning centers, infrastructure study centers, etc.

"Oh, yes," cry the shrill derisive feminists. "A place to teach little girls that their place is in the home."

But, I stray into dangerous territory and away from hollyhocks. In amongst them, in that smokehouse-picket fence corner we had a few wooden boxes for chairs. With a wide plank supported by old wagon hubs, we had a table. This was suitable furniture for inviting Grandma and Mama to our afternoon teas. They were also to judge our hollyhock "dolls" made by turning a blossom upside down for a full southern belle skirt and attaching a sweet pea or daisy for a bonnet. The competition always ended in a tie.

The hollyhocks which were first around the chicken yard here, some fifty-five years ago, drifted about according to the direction of the wind when the little carousel package of seeds were ripe along the white trellis, around the cistern, in a fence corner. They added unexpected color and grace.

I think how like the hollyhock seeds my thoughts are. They do not spill themselves in neat precise rows, come up and bloom where I might have planned. Instead, they are now here with today's events, now there with yesterday's memories, up ahead with possible things to come. They flit about as in a wind, oft times coming to rest in corners of my mind which might otherwise have remained fallow ground. Seeing approximately 800 words I've flittingly thought of endangered species, flower breeding, play houses, feminists, bumblebees, hog pens, wagon hubs, hollyhocks.

Now for an afterthought, not flitting nor fleeting at all. Carl Boyd, super peach orchardist of Anna, Illinois, has sent me, via his sister, Mary, five old-fashioned, single-petaled hollyhocks with rich, dark, former hog pen soil clinging to their roots. It so happened it was Earth Day when I set them out. I felt good about that. Thanks, Carl.

REJOICE!